The Spanish yarn ought to have been meat and drink to the hip and happening Southwark Playhouse. It’s about the sweaty obsession of a disfigured servant, De Flores, for his untouchable mistress Beatrice-Joanna.

She’s a rich Daddy’s girl revolted by De Flores and, in an absurd central sequence, her virginity is tested by drinking a potion which brings on the giggles. Then, as usual in Jacobean melodrama, it all ends in a knife-wielding blood bath.

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Ditching the play’s labyrinthine sub-plots, Michael Oakley’s new production is nothing if not fearless. He attempts to stage the piece as a modern film noir, set in a tycoon’s mansion, and with De Flores turned into a psycho security guard surrounded by CCTV cameras, which he uses to spy on his beloved.

'Everyone in the cast looks terrifically slick'

Everyone in the cast looks terrifically slick, too: the boys in tight trousers and fitted shirts, the girls in designer lingerie.

But Oakley’s hacked-down text founders on the play’s notorious number of asides, spoken by the actors to the audience.

He tries to exploit these as noirish voice-overs, but they work much better as frantically improvised self-justifications. The real pleasure of this play lies in its wickedness, not in its psychological profiling.

Oakley’s cast never seem comfortable on the chic, bare-brick set inside the rumbling tunnels below London Bridge’s railway lines.

Fiona Hampton has the spoilt brat demeanor of a billionaire’s daughter, complete with sullen trout pout — but the other actors aren’t able to recreate the complacent insularity of the rich and powerful.

Oakley’s first mistake is to domesticate the play’s ugly, feral passions with slickness and style. It works better when actors surrender to the moral squalor. At least that way, you can thoroughly disapprove of the whole affair.